Omicron Upends Business Travel Rebound That Barely Found Footing

In travel, and especially business-related travel, call it the rebound that wasn’t. Not if omicron has anything to say about it.

Travel bans are mounting. Davos is being postponed, among the more high-profile international gatherings being put off that might give way to a worldwide domino effect of push-outs and cancellations.

As relayed by PYMNTS on Monday (Dec. 20) or the second consecutive year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has postponed the forum’s meeting, which had originally been slated for next month.

Read also: Davos Economic Forum Postponed; Israel Imposes Travel Bans

“Despite the meeting’s stringent health protocols, the transmissibility of Omicron and its impact on travel and mobility have made deferral necessary,” the organization said — and the push-out may move into the summer, but online meetings could take place next month.

We’ve seen this movie before, as they say. Sporting events are being postponed amid outbreaks (as has been seen with the NFL). Travel bans — where we’ve seen, for example, Israel has put nine nations on a list of countries that citizens are prohibited from visiting — put a huge crimp in business travel. In other cases, individual countries are imposing lockdowns.

Though other confabs are still, officially “on” — such as the National Retail Federation’s Big Show, scheduled for next month in New York City — it may be the case that caution reigns. To paraphrase an old movie quote, if you hold the event, will they come?

A Fluid Situation  

To get a sense of just how fluid the situation might be, consider the fact that the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) issued guidance that stated that business travel recovery had been slow, but projected that we might get back to pre-pandemic levels by 2024. That pace had quickened a bit, from earlier predictions in 2021, when GBTA said that there’d be a business travel recovery by 2025.

And now, of course, with the variants raging, uncertainty gets injected into the mix.

The same organization noted this past week that 82% respondents are “concerned” or “very concerned” about the revenue impact companies in the business travel sector due to omicron. Slightly more than a third of business travel suppliers have said that that bookings have decreased, and a third have said bookings remained the same. Fewer than 20% of those suppliers think their firms will impose new restrictions. But we note that the restrictions might come from the sponsors themselves (witness the Davos postponement).

In the meantime, of course, here in the states employers are re-examining their return to work plans. Individual public events are being canceled depending on where you look.

It all, seemingly, points toward a series of headwinds that may stretch out a business travel rebound that had yet to truly find its footing. And that means, of course, that the digital habits — the Zoom meetings, the phone calls and emails and Slack messages — will remain ever more firmly entrenched.